


Carnage

by SomewhereApart



Series: OQ Angst Fest 2018 [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, OQ Angst Fest, curse of shattered sight, season 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-25 07:31:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15636090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomewhereApart/pseuds/SomewhereApart
Summary: What if Regina had gone to the Merry Men's camp during the Curse of Shattered Sight instead of to the sheriff's station. For OQ Angst Fest, Friday. Prompt: #9: Why did you spare me?





	Carnage

**Author's Note:**

> For OQ Angst Fest, Friday. Prompt: #9: Why did you spare me?

She’d warned him that he ought to fear her, she with her heart black as coal and her blood red lips and her false airs of redemption. She’d warned him, and he should have listened—he can see that clearly now that the anger has settled in and the fog of infatuation has lifted from his eyes. 

She’s a monster, a sinister, deceptive sort that he oughtn’t have trusted, for she’s come to his camp, intent on seeking him out, no doubt to kill him for the betrayal of leaving her for his beloved Marian. He’d felt so guilty over it, so wrecked—he remembers the guilt, but can’t call it up now. He doesn’t know why he might ever have felt guilty for wanting to leave such a monster.

Not now as she stands in the midst of what was once his camp, blood on her hands—the blood of his men. Much and Alan and Tuck lie heartless and still on the ground before him, wrenched off of Robin by her magic and her villainous rage.

The camp had fallen to chaos as the curse of Shattered Sight fell, old grudges rising up into fist fights and worse. Alan and Much had turned on Robin for cavorting with the Queen after everything she’d done to their people, and the others had swiftly followed suit. He’d thought them wrong, had argued heatedly and tried to make them see sense, but she’d murdered them without a care, laid waste to the whole camp, collateral damage for his crimes, and he hates them but he thinks right now he hates her more.

He’s the last man standing, and not for much longer, he imagines, but he won’t cower before her.

He’s knelt before her beauty, paid fealty to her, supped between her thighs and whispered declarations of honor and obedience and _love_ into her skin, and to think of it now with the stench of death all around them makes his stomach turn. 

He won’t kneel. He’ll pay her no vow.

He’ll stand here and die like a man, chin up, eyes steely blue and steady on hers. He knows he can’t best her, but he won’t go down a coward, that’s for damn certain.

But Regina—the Queen—she just stands there and stares at him. He can sense the power rolling off her, the fury, the air has the tang of petrichor over the metallic scent of her bloody carnage. 

And then she turns to go. 

That’s not right, she can’t be leaving—she’d come here to enact her revenge, to seek justice for his sins. She must have.

“Your Majesty!” he calls out to her. The Queen turns, tilts her head, and waits for him to ask, “Why have you spared me?” 

She smiles then, but not the wild sort she’d shown as she’d ripped his men to pieces. This one is more subdued, almost sad, and he thinks he sees a glint of damp in her eyes in what’s left of the firelight. 

With three words, she guts him just as cleanly as if she’d wielded a knife: “You know why.”

She turns again, and he watches her go, watches her step over body after body, and he thinks with a feeling like a sinking stone that perhaps she hadn’t come here to kill him at all.

Perhaps she’d come to protect him. 

He’d loved her, the Queen, and she’d loved him back, and his men had been right in the end after all:

The treachery of that love had cost them their lives. Every last one of them.


End file.
